Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  Also, she was not without hope—it had crossed her mind—that there would be some piece of Nolinger family jewelry she would receive to wear tomorrow—the “something old” of the American wedding ritual. But to be honest, looking at the understated style of both Terry and Cécile, the chances looked dim that Nolinger père thought much about ornament.

  Clara, beautifully dressed in crimson satin as befitted a Jezebel criminal felon, stayed mostly behind the scenes directing last-minute details in the kitchen. Her heart was not in the entertaining. She was still stunned by the intransigent severity of the judge that afternoon, who must have known that though she was legally responsible for it, she didn’t steal the panelling. The censorious words and harsh sentence had shocked her even though she was prepared for them.

  Bradley Dunne had explained that things were likely to go wrong for an unforeseeable reason that had nothing to do with Clara personally—the new independence of French judges, who were determined not to cooperate with pressure from the executive branch. It seemed the minister of justice had called the prosecutor in and explained why for reasons of state it would not do to inflame and agitate the famous director Cray—one reason being that. it would damage the government’s efforts to widen Franco-American film coproduction. Then there was the minister’s personal friendship with the American ambassador, and there was the general unpleasant resonance in the American community, given the woman’s probable innocence, and whatever economic ramifications the unpleasant resonance might have—they had always found foreign investment to diminish at times of strained relations—and so on. Hearing all this had irritated the judiciary, and made it resist the pressure with extra firmness.

  Dunne showed Clara the headline: WILL JUDGES SAY SHOVE IT TO THE MINISTRY IN CRAY CASE?

  News analysis in the International Herald Tribune explained this as a breakthrough show of independence by French magistrates, who had in the past been in sympathy with reasons of state. But now they seemed to be strong enough to insist on the idea of an independent judiciary; so when the prosecutor had recommended letting Clara off, they couldn’t.

  “If they let you off, they’d be caving in to the government,” Bradley Dunne explained to Clara.

  Serge, immersed in preparing his fete, had barely commiserated when she got home, had nodded distantly, had even avoided her, as if she were already in jail. Clara had other concerns too. The Persands, as old friends of Estelle and Anne-Sophie, were expected at the dinner, her first meeting with Antoine after their official parting. It would be a sort of test to see how they could bear it. She expected not to be able to bear it, yet she was buoyed by the hope of feeling his love projected invisibly across the crowd of guests. Just to see him would be a little happiness and give her another picture to hold along with the more intimate ones. She would come out when the Persands got there, but for now had the excuse of arrangements behind the old-fashioned baize door of the kitchen.

  She was here when her mother called, fretfully, from the Adventist Hospital. “I just told them I’m using the phone, I don’t care. You would think no one had ever called Paris, France, from here. They had to get the hospital administrator.”

  “I’ll call them on Monday and get some kind of authorization.”

  “I don’t want to be here on Monday, Clara, I’m not sick. They expect the electricity back on this weekend, I want to go home.”

  “I don’t know, Mother. Serge thinks—the police found—where’s Cristal? ”

  “She‘s—I don’t know, she isn’t happy, she wants to come home. I said Tammi could come to our house too.”

  “But your house, Mother....” Clara sighed. Why was nothing solvable? “Tell Cristal to call me when you see her, okay?”

  Tim was eager to tell Cray about the Driad manuscript being returned to its rightful owner, mysterious as that was, and he wanted to watch Cray when he told him. But it was not so easy to draw Cray away. He was completely absorbed by the arrival at the door of Mayor Briac, who had turned up with three other hunters. They were all dressed in breeches and tweed coats and were bearing shotguns, and the mayor carried a brace of pheasants and a dead rabbit. These he handed ceremoniously to Cray, who stood in the doorway of his château greeting the arriving guests. Tim could not at first imagine who invited the mayor. Was it yet another French custom, perhaps some variation of the droit du seigneur?

  As if his thoughts were read, he heard the mayor say, “It is the custom to thank the proprietor whose game we have shot.” He spoke sardonically, without taking off his sporty cap, as he proffered the game to Cray. Cray motioned to the car parker, who already stood in the gravel drive, to take the bloody offering. “Come in,” he said to Briac, resisting the provocation with mild courtesy. The men stood their guns against the wall.

  Cray, who had at first seemed at a loss, now nodded to the others. “Take the birds to the kitchen, will you?” he said to the car parker. “I wouldn’t want my wife to see those.” He smiled at the mayor. Now it was the mayor who was at a loss, seemingly disconcerted by the conspiratorial tone of Cray’s voice.

  “Too soon to cook them, is it? They have to be hung, I understand?”

  “A few days,” agreed Briac.

  “But I can offer the poor fare we have already prepared,” Cray said. “Passing the time until dinner, we are just having some champagne, and I insist you join us.”

  “As you know, we French people set great store by tradition, and ... Sorry to intrude, I see you are in the middle of something,” said Mayor Briac, blinking as, seeing the blazing candles, the people gathering in the salon, smelling the scented air, he came to appreciate his own understatement. “However, I will be glad to thank the lovely Madame Cray as well. We had a splendid day, perhaps the better for not having shot over this way until this late in the season.”

  Cray picked up the mayor’s shotgun and carried it inside with them, as if intending to put it in a safer place. The car parker took charge of the other guns, moving them a foot inside the door.

  “The woman wants ten thousand dollars,” his father was suddenly muttering at Tim’s elbow.

  “What?”

  “Your bride’s mother. My share of the wedding. First I’d heard of it.”

  “Oh, no, Dad, Anne-Sophie and I are taking care of everything.” He knew his father, retired on a pension, with two wives to support, didn’t have money to spare, and was sorry to hear it had even been mentioned to him.

  “You hear the French are close with a buck—with a franc, ha ha.”

  “No, really.” Tim was shocked to hear the figure, nonetheless. Ten thousand dollars or sixty thousand francs, which must only represent half the cost, assuming Estelle was proposing the two families split the cost. Tim had no idea the thing would rise to twenty thousand dollars. Anne-Sophie had been assuring him matters were going to be done sensibly and modestly. Maybe this was, in the great context of wedding costs, modest? My God.

  “I thought it was the bride’s family that pays. That’s what they told me when I paid for your sister’s wedding, I sure remember that.”

  “I’m not sure how it’s done. That is, I think in France they split it.”

  His father blinked impassively. “It might have been nice to run it by me.”

  Most of the forty guests were now assembled. More people had been arriving than Tim had realized, on foot from where they were staying in the neighborhood, or by car. There were Antoine and Trudi de Persand, for example, and Madame de Persand his mother; Anne-Sophie’s brother, and there were a battery of Anne-Sophie’s cousins and girlfriends, here were Jerry Howarth and Graves Mueller and their wives, and Dick Trent.

  “Where’s Clara?” Cray called. “I have a surprise.”

  Someone went looking for her. With his vaunted sense of drama, Cray had somehow arranged for a little boy to make his entrance on the line “I have a surprise,” with a driver behind him. Lars, their son, a scrubbed-looking boy of eleven, wearing the short pants of an English schoolboy and s
taring in surprise at the unexpected big crowd of people. Clara, coming into the entrance hall, gave a gasp and rushed toward him. Cray too was there embracing the child. People gathered around Clara and her son, moved by her joy. Tim noticed that Clara waved her hands and fingers at the little boy, who was apparently deaf, but Cray spoke aloud to him. Cray embraced the child again, lifted him up, put him down, and returned to the mayor. The radiant Clara began presenting Lars to the various guests.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” said the boy to Tim. He was a fattish boy who looked like Cray, but with his mother’s coloring and smile. He spoke in the monotone of someone who had never heard speech.

  Clara’s heart was wild with gratitude. It was so unexpectedly nice of Serge to see that Lars got home before she had to go to jail. Serge was kindhearted despite his odd, reclusive ways and distant manner, and he loved her. What a bad woman she was.

  She had been in the kitchen talking to Senhora Alvares, who had suddenly whispered, “Your husband, senhora, I didn’t tell him anything.” Clara, momentarily disconcerted by this directness, had only murmured, “Oh, good.” Then she was obliged to ask what Serge had been wanting to know. About what she had been doing while he was gone?

  “Sim, senhora. I told him I hadn’t noticed anyone around. He wondered if there was someone short, tall, bald, what color hair? I said there had been a senhor, for only a few moments, wearing a hat.”

  “Senhora ... thank you. He should not be asking you.”

  Her thoughts raced. Why was Serge checking up on her? He had always seemed completely indifferent to what she did.

  Cray was talking again to the mayor, and was inspecting the mayor’s shotgun, which surely wouldn’t be loaded?

  The champagne was being passed on silver trays by waiters in black jackets. The smells of melted cheese and little sausages en croute competed with the Christmasy pine and the scented candles. Tim stood rooted to his spot near Cray, who continued to chat mildly with other guests, his eyes straying often to Clara, impossibly beautiful in dark red and with the radiance of her happiness in seeing Lars, whom she had not expected for a week. Tim absently answered congratulations and the waggish denigrations of marriage people put to him.

  “How you holding up, Tim? You’ll feel a hell of a lot better when all this is over,” his father said, coming up to him again, having had, it was clear from his newly genial tone, more than one glass of champagne.

  “I’m wondering if it isn’t all a big mistake,” Tim said, this observation coming out with more conviction than he’d meant to convey, but not more than he was feeling.

  His father took it with a seriousness born of experience.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Jitters.”

  “Well, remember it’s much harder getting out of a marriage than it is to break off beforehand. I oughtta know. Last chance.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The important thing is to be true to your instincts,” said his father. “Know where you’re coming from.” Tim wondered when his dad had adopted all this New Age talk.

  A string trio played from the little musician’s gallery in the dining room as the guests were led in to table. Tim caught up with Anne-Sophie. He had a chance to whisper his news: “The manuscript was returned to the owner, after all that.”

  “I know.” She smiled archly. “It was I who sent it, from the American post office. C‘etait moi.”

  It took a second for Tim to register this. “How did you get it? Ah—Gabriel gave it to you. Or Delia?”

  “I looked for it in my grenier and found it as I expected.”

  Tim spluttered, his wits failing before the task of explaining this to himself. She hadn’t shown it to him, she hadn’t mentioned it—what could account for such a lack of trust, of complicity, of consideration? He would have liked to have seen it, at least. “How could you do that?”

  “Well, if you’d known about it, you’d have to tell your friend from Amsterdam. They’d keep the poor young man in jail forever, and after all, he didn’t steal it, or kill anyone. He’ll be disappointed, won’t he, when he goes back to look for it?”

  “You’ll tell Cees. You’ll explain to him—”

  “You can explain. I’d rather not.”

  “Plus you sent a half-million-dollar manuscript through the U.S. mail?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t with the Poste française, but I’m sure the American post is perfect. Think how clever Americans are with bombs that go down the chimney and so on.” Was Anne-Sophie mocking him? He did not know. Tim could not explain his wonder, his dumbfounded sense of talking to a complete stranger.

  58

  The Rules of the Game

  The table was set with greenery and golden bells, symbols both of weddings and Noel, tied with ribbons reading “Anne-Sophie et Tim,” and place cards ranging the guests from Cray at the far end, with the mothers Cécile and Estelle on either side of him, to Clara at the far end with the grandmother, Anne-Sophie and Tim on either side of her, a deaf uncle, and then the young American and French friends along the sides. Madame de Persand mère sat near her old friend Estelle. No one appeared disappointed with the plan de table, Clara’s speciality.

  Cray drifted with the guests, the gun under his arm, leading the mayor toward the long table, or series of tables unified by one cloth, set for forty people. The shotgun was broken correctly and pointed toward the floor. All the same, Tim wished Cray would give it back to the mayor. But Cray just leaned the gun against the table at his own place and began rearranging the place cards to make room for the mayor and the three others with him, and calling for more chairs. The mayor, it appeared, would go next to Cray, between him and either Cécile or Estelle.

  The dinner, punctuated by toasts to fiancés, to the morrow, and of thanks to the Crays, was a simple and good one of clear soup, roast lamb and brown potatoes, and a flaming pudding carried in with musical fanfare on silver trays, for which the lights had to be put out. Then some of Anne-Sophie’s friends had prepared a skit—there would be more skits tomorrow night after the actual wedding. Here the pretty young Frenchwomen put on aprons and sang a song they had composed about Anne-Sophie, of which Tim only noted the refrain:

  Ma main était bien jouée; nous sommes maries, nous sommes mariés.

  I’ve played my hand well, we’re married.

  Dick Trent had clearly lost his heart to Pussy Lautremont. She gave him a flirtatious wink as the singers sat back down.

  Escape, escape, thought Tim miserably, unable to stop thinking about the Driad Apocalypse and Anne-Sophie’s treachery.

  “I have something that I’d like to offer,” Cray said. The shotgun, Tim noted, was now laid safely under the table. Cray got up and went to the projector Tim had noticed earlier set up at the back. The blank white wall at the other end of the dining room was animated with black-and-white blurs and flickers, which then resolved into a woman hurrying across a foyer. Cray stopped the film and rewound it for a minute. People left off talking and reorganized their chairs so everyone could see.

  “This is a new print of this great classic with the sound track remastered,” Cray explained in a loud, public voice. “The sound still isn’t good, but good enough, I think.”

  Tim recognized without being able for an instant to put a name to a newsreel-like scene of men in a variety of overcoats, tweed caps, and country clothes walking many abreast across a thicketed field, shouting and laughing, knocking at branches and shrubs with sticks or throwing rocks ahead of them into the bushes. Many people murmured in recognition.

  Immediately it came to him that this was Jean Renoir’s great film La Règle du Jeu. Rules of the Game. In the scene Cray was showing, these were the beaters, locals driving the game ahead of them toward a party of aristocratic and fashionable hunters. The assembled company at the Crays’ murmured expectantly, since everybody liked a movie, and this was a great classic, as Cray had said.

  Tim remembered that the characters in the film were at a country hous
e party. The analogy must have come to Cray hosting this party tonight. His purpose was not clear—to make a point about hunting, or simply to entertain his guests? It didn’t seem a very nuptial movie. It seemed a damned strange movie to show at a wedding party. Tim watched the mayor and his friends at the same time as he watched the film. Their faces were politely impassive and interested. Cray had disappeared.

  Ahead of the beaters, rabbits ran, and small birds flittered up or broke from the heavy copse into glorious untrammeled flight. Even remastered, the sound track was old and thin. This came out when? The forties, Tim imagined. He was no film historian, but he thought before the Second World War, long before his birth, when movies looked like this, and their tinny music sounded as it had whenever film first got sound.

  The partridges and hares, with rising panic or innocent instinct, fled before the beaters. The camera lingered on one appealing rabbit, her hesitant hop, warily concerned, and on a frightened squirrel. At the other end of a field stood the members of the marquis’s house party, beautiful women in suits with big shoulder pads and smart little hats, men in tenue of the field, all of them with shotguns, laughing and chatting to each other as they waited for the quarry to run within range, and there was some personal drama one or two of the characters were discussing—he couldn’t remember about that. They talked about it as they waited to shoot, but the sound track was still flawed and hard to understand.